Thursday, 23 January 2014

Having read somewhere that all religions are death cults,
Pope Mountebank I, Spiritual Leader of the Televisual Congregation of the
Modern Day, decided to test his supposition that all he really needed to get
things cooking was a New Revised List of Prophecies Signifying the Arrival of a,
Possibly The, Messiah (succinctness had never been a forte).

A New Revised List of
Prophecies Signifying the Arrival of a, Possibly The, Messiah

from The New New
Testament’s Godspell accordingly to St Jean-Luc Picard

A, possibly The, Messiah will be born with a tattoo of the
letter “M” (but where?!). Said tattoo
will be yellow on a red background, proving that he is a, possibly The, Messiah
(“M” for Messiah, as all of his biographies will be called), and that he is also
one of the people (re: having a tattoo; being sponsored by McDonald’s; and similar things). A, Possibly The, Messiah
will be called Gavin or Wayne or, and here’s the important part, something like
that. Gavin/Wayne/Similar/A/The Messiah will be an obscurantist demagogue much
enamoured of greeting-card philosophy and reality television. He will wear sumptuously
exquisite clothes from George @ Asda
and his general manner will be arrogant, almost to the point of humility. His
opponents, of which there will be many, will all be servile, disobliging
contrarians who only manage to get through life by practising an unattractive
combination of caprice, bravura and pretending that they don’t vote Tory. Gavin/Wayne/Similar/A/The
Messiah will bring an end to the world (but how?), during which his devout and right-about-everything followers
will laugh and sing and dance because everyone else is having to watch re-runs of “Sarah
Beeny’s Selling Houses” for all eternity.

Sunday, 19 January 2014

From this, I deduce (incorrectly, as it turned out) that I
should tell her a lie to cheer her up (what with the truth making her sad, and
all that).

“I once had a number 1 hit in Norway,” I say. Norway? “I mean Denmark,” I correct
myself. Denmark? What’s the sodding
difference? Norway, Denmark. Denmark, Norway. They’re completely
interchangeable in the minds of people who haven’t read their history books, especially
ones about the Second World War (me, for starters). I may as well have stuck
with Norway. “Actually, I think it was Norway and Denmark,”
I elaborate, digging yet deeper. “I think the Scandinavian countries decided to
collate their record sales in the 70s or 80s,” I say, inanely, “after ‘Norwegian Wood’ became Denmark’s
best-ever selling single; it only reached number 11 in the Norwegian charts,
thanks to a campaign not to buy it, orchestrated by the Norwegian Society of Ironists. The Norwegian Phonographic Industry were
hugely embarrassed and persuaded Denmark to jump into bed with them, so to
speak.” I’m quite bored (or possibly exhausted) by all my lying, so shut up.

“Well then, you must have had a number 1 hit in Sweden as
well,” she says.

“Why must I have had a number 1 hit in Sweden as well?” I
ask. “That doesn’t follow.”

“Because Sweden is a Scandinavian country…” she says in her ‘Derr, ficko!’ voice.

“So what,” I say.

“Well, you said that the Scandinavian countries put all
their record sales together, or something,” she answers.

Geography books as well as history books. Oh, dear. “Sweden refused to join in,” I explain. This
part, at least, is partially true (not the refusing
to join, but the fact of not joining; there was nothing to join, so how could
they?).

She looks at me with her ‘Oh,
yeah?’ face, eyes wide with incredulity (not to mention the folded arms, the
leaning back in the chair: the Full Treatment).

“Denmark and Norway refused to buy any records by ABBA as a protest…” against what? Think! “…against Sweden’s continued involvement in
the slave trade, which meant that ABBA
would never have had any number 1s on their home soil – which is mainly rock
and ice, I think – and the Swedish Pornographic Industry would never have stood
for that.”

“Sweden’s Pornographic
Industry?” she squeals, emphasizing the ‘graph’
in pornographic. I consider making an inappropriate, graph-based joke, but
decide that enough is enough.

“All right, all right,” I say. “I didn’t really have a
number 1 hit in Scandinavia; I was just trying to cheer you up.”

“Come here, you,” she says in her you’re a lap-dog voice.

I do as I am bid, but as I get up to cross to her, she gets
up and leaves.

“Twit,” she mutters, leaving me dumbfounded, or it
confounded?

By the time I have gathered what passes for my wits, I call
after her, “No, but I really did once have a number 7 hit in Romania!” but she
is out of earshot, so I ask the barman for another pint of bitter. “Only, this
time, leave out the freshly squeezed lemon juice,” I say. “As far as fusion
beverages go, I’m not sure it worked.”

“Would you like the freshly squeezed juice of a kumquat with
that?” he asks.

I laugh at his suggestion, but nod my head in agreement.

“Let’s go mad!” I shout, and jump off a cliff.

Although, now
that I come to think of it, it might have been a bar-stool.

Saturday, 18 January 2014

I explain to my spychiatrist that the phrase psychiatrist’s chair is a misnomer, as it
is the psychiatrist who sits in the psychiatrist’s chair: the psychiatrist’s
patient sits in the psychiatrist’s patient’s chair, not in the psychiatrist’s
chair.

“Don’t you mean spychiatrist?”
she asks.

I suspect humour is afoot, and I laugh. I find my laughter to
be unwelcome, like a mouthful of cream bun of Day Four of Your Latest Diet.

My spychiatrist tells me about a new offer: All You Can Say
for £150 with a free diagnosis at the end. I tell her that I can do this at
home by saying all I want to my bedroom wall and then diagnosing myself as having
Borderline Personality Disorder, all for less than a tenner.

We move on to the subject of medication. “Polo mints, fruits
pastilles or Jacob’s cream crackers,” she says, and hands me a leaflet to read.
I learn that an added benefit of Jacob’s cream crackers is that they deter
dragon attacks. This is news to me.

“I’ve been reading your blog,” she says. I am so slow on the
uptake. Spychiatrist. Of course.

I have to explain to her that the spychiatrist in the blog
is not the same as the spychiatrist I see in front of me, and that the narrator
in the blog isn’t really with it. I explain that I’m getting fed up with having
to construct sentence after sentence of indirect speech which, as the astute
reader will have observed, is how I report what I have said whilst I am at the
spychiatrist’s; the spychiatrist is the only one of us whose speech is reported
directly (apart from the odd italicized phrase which indicates direct speech
from me). I explain that I don’t think the spychiatrist in the blog is really
saying enough.

I wonder whose fault this is.

“So, you’d like me to say more for this blog?” she asks.

I explain that this would be very helpful, or possibly useless,
depending on what she says. And all the while she’s listening to me, she isn’t
talking, leaving all the work to me. But such is the nature of spychiatry that
I fear she may not be able to make any contribution beyond the occasional
open-ended question.

“Have you noticed the time?” she asks.

I glance at the clock, get up, and leave, slamming the door
on my way out. I kick the bannisters on the way down the stairs, misspelling the
word “banisters” in my fury, and, quite literally, throw my toys out of the
pram, metaphorically speaking.

Later, I realize that banister can be spelt bannister or
banister, and I send my spychiatrist a can of Pepsi Max by way of apology, with
a note which says, “Don’t read anything into that remark about Pepsi Max by the
way; it’s just a coincidence.”Perhaps I should feature more apology notes; they seems to be
more loquacious than spychiatrists.

sesquipedalicon, neologism (intransitive portmanteau 'sesquipedalian + emoticon'): an emoticon which
is too complex to be expressed as a series of twee punctuation marks, and whose
characters thus have to be translated into, or expressed as, words (see ‘paradox’
if in danger of taking this definition too seriously).

E.g. “As an historical document, Blackadder displays exactly
the sort of inaccuracies which one would associate with a Stalinist state #missingthepoint
@*sententious face*.”

Having trawled the net exhaustively on Google for eight
minutes, here are the best sesquipedalicons which I have encountered so far,
mainly on twatter, but also on Falseberk and other anti-social media shites. In keeping with the Oxford English Dictionary's convention, I have typed the

sesquipedalicons between asterisks and in bold type.

‘Tis with our judgment as our watches, none

Go just alike, yet each believes his own – #AlexanderPope @*apophthegmatic face*

How well I remember that window of twenty minutes in my childhood
when our mother was in a good mood. Not the pretend good mood she used for birthdays
and the occasional Christmas, and which Brother and I could see through as
easily as if it was a broken window (like the one he smashed with grandfather’s
air-rifle once, as a bet with the gardener), but an actual, proper good mood. A
good mood like we experienced when we went round to a friend’s house and were
allowed, by the friend’s Mum (Mum?! such
informality!) to eat Heinz tinned spaghetti for lunch, instead of the brown wholewheat
spaghetti with lumpy, virtually inedible bolognaise sauce, which no-one was
allowed to leave unfinished, and which was standard fare at our house.

We had stopped off in a small town on the way to Cornwall
for our annual festival of misery: Camping in August. Our mother bought an
ice-cream for Brother and me, but there were no fights; no “You can have an ice-cream as long as it’s in a flavour you hate”;
no “And none of that disgusting Mr Whippy
muck which isn’t even ice-cream”. Just, “Would you like an ice-cream?” Smile.

“Would you like an
ice-cream?” Smile. What on earth could that
mean?

Brother and I looked at each other; waiting for the catch;
waiting to be shouted at for saying the wrong thing; for choosing a flavour
which was morally reprehensible.

I had initially gone for vanilla, a flavour which I knew
might win some fleeting maternal approval, while Brother, always infinitely more
daring than I, had initially gone for the infinitely more daring and morally
corrupt chocolate, probably because he had a death wish or something and was
always seeing what latest madness he could get away with.

“Oh, why don’t you choose something different?” she suggested.

As always, it was Brother who went first. “Mint chocolate
chip, please,” he confidently asked. God, how did he do it? Had ever a phrase been
uttered in the English language which contained such bravery, such wanton
disregard for personal safety? I waited for the familiar smack to the side of
the head; the instant eruption of Brother’s anger and his floods of tears and
my subsequent wish to be invisible or dead; the “Right, back in the car!” or similar.

Instead, she said, “Of course.”

I was eventually cajoled into asking for rum and raisin, a
flavour which I had long wanted to try, and the flavour which, as an adult, I
will always choose, whenever the need to pick a flavour of ice-cream arises.

We sat and ate our ice-creams in nervous silence, wolfing
them down before mother realized the terrible mistake she had made; before she
had a chance to confiscate them; before she had a chance to find a health food
shop and buy something brown and wholefood to counteract the deleterious effect
of those ice-creams.

Years later, when she had given up all pretence of actually
liking us and had sent us to board in a loveless and austere boarding school at
the edge of the North Yorkshire Moors, so that she could get a really good, uninterrupted
suntan in Dubai for four years, she would take us to Baskin Robins for a treat
(during the two holidays a year, when, for a total of seven weeks, Brother and
I were allowed to share in the endless sun of the ex-patriot lifestyle before
being sent back to the rainswept misery of Colditz). Baskin Robbins was an
ice-cream parlour which didn’t do morally acceptable flavours at all, and was
our first experience of the dizzyingly delightful vulgarity of American
culture. All the other displaced British nationals went there, and our being
allowed to go was a case of when in Rome,
do as the ex-pats do rather than any personality volte face on the part of Mother.

By this time, Brother and my roles had undergone something
of a reversal: he was dutiful and obliging; I was an adolescent nightmare. I
always went for either peanut butter and
chocolate, as it was the second most decadent, immoral and unchristian ice-cream
flavour they had, or bubblegum, because
it looked like it had the least nutritional value of anything in the known universe (and
because it was pink).

Years later, I bought my oldest son his first holiday
ice-cream, when he was four-years-old: a Mr
Whippy double cone. We sat on a bench, while Son attempted to eat his
ice-cream, about 65% of which melted and dribbled all over his arms, his t-shirt,
his shorts, and his skinny, four-year-old legs. I looked at this vision of
childhood gluttony, ecstatic at the exuberant, extravagant, wasteful stickiness of it all.

Saturday, 11 January 2014

As I painted the inside of my… no, wait: I can’t paint. I
made a mood collage using the words which I am no longer allowed to say, but
this had no effect whatsoever, so I nailed seven balloons on to the surface of
a bowl of uncooked rice. No explanation is required to explain the failure of
this approach.

I disguised last night’s argument… wait: not yet. I
practised nodding sagely so that the next time somebody uses an obscure word
out of context, like semiotics, I would
be able to disguise my discomfort by appearing like a well-practised, nodding
sage. While I waited for that to happen, I disguised last night’s argument as a
triumph for common sense. There. Timing.

I pondered whether or not I would be drawn into reminiscing
about the bad old days with a recently deceased friend who had accidentally
come to stay. This was dismissed.

Last night, I tried to discover if I was Welsh. By this
morning, I had misplaced this notion and so was back to being, what: Spanish? I
can’t even remember my own nationality now, let alone the precise location of
my children.

It is time for my spychiatrist to make some sort of sense.

“Do you think that you have you been making much sense
recently?” she asks. “For example, the last 206 words?” I explain to her that I
always make sense to me, and that if other people are having difficulty making
sense then they always have the option of exiting the page. Metaphorically, of
course.

“But you can’t exit the page…” I am not sure if this is a
question, an unfinished sentence, or a taunt. I interpret it as an unfinished
sentence and complete it for her. Because,
I say. Unfortunately, I have no idea why I can’t exit the page and so we are
stuck, the spychiatrist and I, in the unspoken space of my own cognitive
incompetence.

I ask her if it has anything to do with penguins. I am
clutching at straws. Or maybe penguins.

There is another silence. It occupies the space between us, a bit like the unwanted laughter which escapes from your lips when you are told of
someone’s untimely death... which is a sentence so flawed that it's difficult to know where to begin.

“Why do you think of me as your spychiatrist?” she asks, but
I tell her that I have no idea what she is talking about and counter her
question by asking her how she knows my thoughts.

“It rather helps that you tell me what they are,” she
explains.

“Why do you think your attempts at avoiding depression
failed?” my spychiatrist asks, finally making some sort of sense of the first 206 words.

But I am surprised that she has to even ask, and I rise to
leave, feeling slightly guilty that I had to split an infinitive, even when not
to have done so would have sounded unnatural. Even has to ask. Maybe it wouldn’t have sounded so forced after
all.

Reclusive author, God,
has announced a new book. The NME went to interview him.

God says, “Like undrinkable coffee, my forgiveness is
instant.”

He is trying to be accessible, but as anyone who has ever
read any of his books will know, God’s gnomic style can seem a little
contrived; in speech, this is even more so. Has he, I wonder, developed a
Morrissey complex during his long absence from the world of letters?

“Well, I suppose one’s life would be a bit more interesting
if one did. But no, of course I haven’t. No. Life is too short for such futile
endeavours…” The sentence tails off, and God looks into the distance. “Although
I did quite like ‘The Queen is Dead’,”
he smiles.

I ask God the inevitable question (Where’ve you been?), but already he looks bored; bored and slightly
agitated. He shifts uncomfortably in his seat. We are sitting on two rather functional
chairs in his hotel room (Premier Inn, Leicester: where else?). It is God’s
fifth interview of the day. He clears his throat and then does a little sort of
hum before answering. “When things go
wrong, I tend to make myself scarce; not that you’d notice, as I am, for the main
part, invisible.” He hasn’t really answered my question yet. I decide to see
where he is going with his answer. “If I turn up for you, then I have to turn
up for everybody, but it’s just not realistic anymore. You can’t simply come
running to me because you’ve …” here, God pauses, almost stumbles, then becomes
animated and uses his fingers as quotation marks, “…‘got pancreatic cancer’ or because your child has ‘gone missing’.”

I am about to ask why not, then remember who it is that I am
talking to.

“I hope I’m making myself understood,” he says. Is this what
it’s all about, then? Setting the record straight. Despite the fact that he
didn’t answer my previous question, I decide to go for another big one. Which religion is right?

God looks at me. He looks disappointed. He looks away, out
of the window. “Surely everybody knows that by now?” he asks, exasperated, but
before I have a chance to say that everybody doesn’t know, he mentions the new
book. “It’s going to be amazing,” he says, momentarily brightening up. Going to be? I ask. Having waited all
this time, God turns up with news of a new book which he hasn’t even written, yet?! “It’s not as straightforward
as that. There’s the issue of the ghost-writer, and…”

Of course. I barely hear what God says next, as I digest
this news. It makes sense. After all, everything else ‘written’ by God was
ghost-written, so why not the new book?

I drift back into what God is saying. The clock has ticked
ominously on, and our interview is almost at an end. “I have a publisher and a
title; everything else is just window dressing,” he says.

I ask him who? and
what? “Penguin Modern Classics,” he
says in answer to the first one, and “Autobiography” in answer to the second.

Only Morrissey, I quip, gets his autobiography published in
Penguin Classics.

God does not seem amused.

The interview ends, and I wonder what next for this
reclusive and troubled individual. A career in hairdressing, perhaps?

Friday, 10 January 2014

2 “I’ve Got You Under
My Sink” is the most downloaded song from the Cole Porter Songbook for
Dyslexic Sociopaths.

3 Paul (now Sporl)
McCartney wrote “Hey Jude!” for his
then Jewish girlfriend, wot’serface (oh,
come on; someone other than me has to find this joke funny eventually, for fuck’s
sake).

4 When thinking of a stage-name, thingummyjig, who, as we
all know, went on to find fame and embarrassment as Adam Ant, considered
calling himself Percy Stent or Henry Lenting.

5 The surname of the girl made famous in the Duran Duran
song “Rio” was not, ironically, de Janeiro; no, it was Tact. She later married Jim Kerr.

6 Mick (now Smick) Jagger
is a fake.The real Smick Jagger has
been sitting in the House of Lords since 1961. Everything about the fake Smick
Jagger is fake, apart from – and you will laugh at this – his accent. That’s
right, the only authentic thing about the fake Smick Jagger is his voice. And
his knighthood, which he was awarded for servicing to women.

Wednesday, 8 January 2014

I explain to my spychiatrist that I think I may have been a
coffee-table in a previous life/existence (one can’t call being a coffee-table
a ‘life’, so I say life and then add existence as an afterthought).

“Really?” she asks.

The no which I
offer is backed up by the explanation that I had wanted to say something
suitably interesting to a person in her profession; I fear that if I tell her
something as mundane as how I feel
she might become bored. I don’t want to waste her time. It tell her that the
coffee-table claim had reminded me of the occasion of my First Confession (not
that I am a master criminal, it’s just that my parents tried to bring me up as
a Catholic): the priest had asked me what sins I had committed, and I had not
wanted to waste his time with a list of minor, petty infarctions.

My spychiatrist politely interrupts me with an observation. “You
mean infractions,” she says, and then
explains the difference between the two. I am too polite to tell her that I am
aware of the difference.

During my First Confession, I had been worried about
disappointing the priest with a list of minor, petty infractions (infarctions
is the better word), and so I tell him that I like trying to bend the pins on
plugs, thus making it difficult, though not impossible, to insert them into the
wall sockets. The priest had asked me why I did this, which I hadn’t realized
was part of the bargain, so I had said the first thing which had come into my
head, namely, I don’t know.

I stop talking at this point.

The silence sits there like a poorly constructed simile.

“What happened next?” my spychiatrist asks, but I tell her that
I can’t remember.

I tell my spychiatrist that I secretly refer to her as my
spychiatrist.

“Do you think that I am spying on you?” she asks.

I explain to her that spychiatrist
sounds better than psychiatrist and
am just about to add like infarction
sounds better than infraction, but I notice the time, gather my thoughts, and
leave.

I realize, as I walk to the bus-stop, that I never shared
such intimacies with my spychologist.